“AMONG THE FLOWER STALLS.”
“I shall say nothing,” he said.
They both stood silent there a moment, looking away from each other. Then the woman, feeling her knees grow weak and trembling under her, sank back into her seat; and the man, urged by some impulse of self-protection which demanded that he should fly, had bowed and left the room before she had quite recovered from the momentary dizziness which had possessed her as she fell into her chair. She heard the front door close behind him presently, and knew that he was gone. Then she felt that she must brace herself to meet Martha calmly.
When the young girl, a few moments later, came in with her load of flowers, and smilingly uttered her apologies and surprise at having missed her, her friend’s senses seemed somehow to return, and she was able to answer calmly.
It seemed to Martha that the beautiful princess looked ill, and she was tenderly anxious about her; but she little suspected that during those few moments of her absence Sonia and her old love had been face to face, or, more marvelous still, that Harold had seen again the woman who had been his wife.
X
The impression left upon the mind of Sonia by that meeting with Harold was an intensely disturbing one. Even the stirrings of old feeling, and the memories of past pleasures and pains, which the sight of him had recalled, were less strong in her than a certain feeling of humiliation. She felt that she had been overcome by so great a weakness that she must have made a self-betrayal of which it nearly maddened her to think. Knowing how completely she had been thrown off her guard by this totally unexpected meeting, she felt that every emotion of her heart, which she herself was so conscious of, had been laid bare to him, and she could not rest for the torment of that thought. Her hours with Martha were therefore disturbed and unsatisfactory to them both; and when, soon after the mid-day meal, Martha asked her if she would like to drive, she accepted the relief of that idea with alacrity, only stipulating that they should not go to the crowded Bois.
Martha ordered the carriage, and they drove about for an hour or two, stopping several times to go in and look at churches which they had often seen, but never entered. In some of these vespers were in progress, and they paid their sous for seats near the door, and sat down for a few moments; but the music played too dangerously upon Sonia’s overwrought feelings, and she hurried her friend away.
In one or two of the smaller churches there were only silent kneeling figures here and there, and the two women walked about, looking at the mixture of dignified antiquity and tawdry decoration on every side, and reading the tablets all about the approach to the chancel, erected as thank-offerings to Mary and Joseph for favors granted. In spite of her inward perturbation, Sonia could not help smiling at the economy of words on some of these. One or two had merely, “Merci, Joseph,” or “Merci, Marie et Joseph,” while the more elaborate ones recorded the thanks of the giver of the tablet for a favor received—the restoration of a beloved child from illness, the conversion of an erring son, the rescue of a husband from shipwreck, and even the miraculous intervention of Mary and Joseph to restore to health a little boy who had been gored by a bull. The very ignorance of it was touching to the two women, and the conviction that it was in each of these poor hearts a reaching upward kept them from feeling any scorn.